How teenager ‘with body of a 30-year-old’ became Spurs’ record signing
Too fat, too lazy. The report cards were in for Tanguy Ndombele, and they did not make for comfortable reading. First, it was Guingamp who cast him out, deeming him not worthy of a professional contract, and now it was Amiens who were saying a firm no to this shy young midfielder with a protruding belly.
Ndombele had joined Amiens in 2014, when he was 17. At that age, the most talented players are often beginning to forge their paths into senior football. Ndombele’s route pointed in the other direction, away from the professional game and back towards home.
They welcomed him with open arms at Linas-montlhery, the amateur club who Ndombele thought he had left for good four years earlier. There was some surprise, though – if not a little shock – at the state of his body. “When he came back from Amiens, he came into the shower room,” says Mickael Bertansetti, the club president. “He was a teenager, but he had the physique of a 30-yearold.”
Cold reality slapped Ndombele in the face. Five other professional clubs had said no, too. “He was hurt,” says Bertansetti. Something had to change for Ndombele, unfit and unwanted, and that journey home ultimately became a defining moment for the boy who would go
on to become the most expensive player in Tottenham Hotspur’s history.
The total fee for Ndombele, paid to Lyon in five instalments, could be £63million. It is an extraordinary show of faith by a club who have been so reluctant to spend money in recent windows, and few arrivals to the Premier League have generated as much excitement in the past couple of seasons.
The spotlight will shine brightly on Ndombele on Saturday, when Tottenham host Aston Villa in their first game of the campaign.
They will be watching at Linas-montlhery, where framed Ndombele shirts hang on the walls and a poster bearing the 22-yearold’s face has been attached to the club’s small, solitary stand. Those seats double up as a staircase to the clubhouse, where visitors will find pictures of a young Ndombele celebrating his youth team triumphs. He was small back then, playing alongside kids who were almost two years older, and few believed he would ever reach these footballing heights.
On a suffocatingly hot July day, the Linas-montlhery pitch remains in pristine condition. It was here, in sight of the 13th-century Montlhery castle that pokes above the trees, where Ndombele first began to sweat out the extra weight after his Amiens rejection. He trained with the club’s senior team, which included his older brother Bosso, and ran laps of the pitch with Nordine Baaroun, his former coach.
“He came here to lose weight and build muscle,” says Bertansetti, pointing out the corners of the field where Ndombele would run.
Baaroun found a personal trainer and sorted Ndombele’s diet. “It was a slow process,” says Bertansetti. “It is the nature of his body. He has to work to have this body. His brother is the same. If he does not play sport, he will put on weight. It’s genetics.”
The way Baaroun tells it, Ndombele was nearly a stone overweight. So they worked, pumping iron, running hard, eating well. Ndombele sometimes asked to stay at Baaroun’s house to maximise their training time, rather than making the 40-minute trip home to Epinaysoussenart, to the south of Paris. Throughout it all, and despite the lack of interest from leading clubs, Ndombele remained quietly confident. “He never, never doubted,” Baaroun tells The Daily Telegraph. “When he came back from Amiens, I asked him: ‘Do you think you are going to give up?’ He said to me: ‘Don’t worry, Nordine. Don’t worry. I will go all the way.’ He has done what he wanted.”
After two months, Baaroun made contact with Amiens, asking for a second chance and insisting that Ndombele was physically ready to compete. Intrigued by the potential of a leaner, more focused player, they said yes. “From there, it began,” says Baaroun. “He matured suddenly.”
The return to Amiens was the first major step towards stardom, then, but the dream started much earlier for Ndombele. He grew up in Epinay-sous-senart, the middle of three brothers born to parents of Congolese descent. Like so many of the Parisian suburbs, or banlieues, it is an area without wealth. The Ndombeles lived in an eight-storey block known as La Plaine III, and the little Tanguy used to dart around the town’s marketplace when he was not playing football at the nearby FC d’epinay Athletico.
As a child, his talent was obvious. “When he played here, the stand was full of people who had come just to see him,” says Novic Bayokila, a childhood friend and former team-mate.
“He had skill that we did not have. It was not a smooth route to get to the top but I always knew he would make it.”
Bayokila says that Ndombele’s father would serve as the team’s “12th man”. He would talk to Ndombele during games, urging his son to express himself. Ndombele’s mother, meanwhile, worked at a nearby church. Thanks to her, faith has been a constant in Ndombele’s life. “They are a very calm, religious family,” says Bayokila.
Those who knew Ndombele then, and those who know him now, speak of an introvert. Despite his spectacular skill as a boy – Bayokila says he would regularly
‘The stand was full of people who came to see him play as a child’
produce “sombrero” flicks over opponents’ heads – Ndombele has always been reserved. At times, his timid nature has worked against him. “People could think he was arrogant,” says Bayokila. “He is not the kind of person who would mix with people. He would not go and speak to everybody.”
In his home town, there is an affection towards Ndombele and an overwhelming sense of pride at his rise since he left Epinay-soussenart. “We only have football here,” says Bayokila. “Football is the escape. When I saw him in the French team, I was almost crying.” From FC d’epinay Athletico, Ndombele first travelled to Linas-montlhery at the age of 12. He played with a higher year group and essentially trailed most of his team-mates by two years because of his December birthday. In pictures of the squad from the time, Ndombele is dwarfed, both in height and width, by some of his friends.
He was good, though, and those physical disadvantages only helped him to develop his technical ability. “That is what made the difference,” says Baaroun. “That is why he exploded very late. As soon as he grew up like everyone else, he was better than everyone. I knew that at one time or another, he would explode.” Incidentally, those two years at Linas-montlhery have ensured that the club will receive €350,000 (£322,000) of the transfer fee paid to Lyon. The money will pay for a renovation of the same changing rooms where Ndombele was once told he was too fat to make it as a top-level player.
Guingamp, in Brittany, liked what they saw of Ndombele, who impressed with his desire to play the ball forward, and signed him to their academy when he was 14. As always, he was one of the more reserved of the young players, exuding an air of nonchalance that was not always appreciated by the coaching staff.
He formed a close friendship with James Lea Siliki, who now plays for Rennes. “We made little mistakes, like everyone else,” Lea Siliki told Ouest France last year. “Sometimes we went to get pizza in secret when we did not finish our meal.”
Those late-night carbs, and that laid-back attitude, did not work in Ndombele’s favour when Guingamp decided against awarding him with a professional contract. He dropped down to Amiens but kept looking for a top-level club. He could not find one, and soon he was hit by that second rejection as Amiens showed him the door. “Here we see the incompetence of the clubs,” says Baaroun, fiercely loyal to his friend. “The weight is not a handicap. Talent is what is important.
“As long as you see the boy’s talent and mentality, the weight should not be a problem. But apparently for professional clubs in France, it is a problem. They want you to bring them a player shaped like Cristiano Ronaldo.” Angers, Auxerre and Caen all turned him down.
“They must regret it, these clubs,” says Baaroun.
After that self-imposed boot camp in Montlhery and his return to Amiens, Ndombele began to develop at a startling rate. He became a first-team regular in 2016, helping the club to win promotion to Ligue 1 and earning himself a loan move to Lyon. He made 50 appearances in his first season before signing on a permanent deal in 2018.
At Lyon, he has impressed with his dynamism and creativity. His dribbling ability, outstanding for a central midfielder, is crucial to his game and it is telling that Ndombele had the best dribble success rate of any player who completed more than 50 dribbles in Ligue 1 last season. There are plenty of similarities to the departed Mousa Dembele, but Ndombele offers far more in the final third of the pitch.
His passing should allow Tottenham’s forwards to thrive and in his time as a professional he has become far more conscious of his defensive duties than he ever was as a teenager.
“He is strong physically and, above all, technically,” said Bruno Genesio, Ndombele’s manager at Lyon this year.
“With the first touch, he manages to pass even three players, and when he starts he is difficult to stop. He is precise
with his passing and he has a nice dribble.”
It was little surprise when Ndombele received his first France cap, in October last year, and even the most casual observers knew he would be on the move from Lyon soon enough. Ever since making his breakthrough at Amiens, Ndombele has surpassed every expectation and cleared every hurdle. As Baaroun says, it has been an “explosion” of talent, and the frightening truth for Tottenham’s opponents is that Ndombele has shown no signs of losing momentum.
Mauricio Pochettino, for his part, has called for patience. “We need to accept he needs time to adapt to a new culture, a new country, new habits,” the Tottenham manager said. “Of course, it is only him who arrived to the club and that makes it more difficult. He is open to improving and learning but needs time [until we] see the best version of him.”
It is an understandable approach to take with a player who has arrived to such fanfare. Ndombele, though, has always believed he was destined for this stage. The chubby introvert, sneered at by so many top clubs, has pushed forward to become one of Europe’s most exciting midfielders. He will not stop now.